is there such a thing as personal identity?

7/29/2019 Is There Such a Thing as Personal Identity?

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Gene ral Phi l osophy Tuto r ial

IS TH E R E S U C H A TH I N G A S P E R -S O N A L ID E N T I T Y ?

R E N M A R I O M I C A L L E F


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I S T H E R E S U C H A T H I N G A S P E R S O N A L I D E N T I T Y ?

Ren M ar io Mica l l efHeythrop College, University of London

1. INTRODUCTION

D. Wiggins in his 1967 book Identity and Spa-

tio-temporal continuity speaks about personal du-

plication using a brain-splitting technique (as yet not

surgically feasible, though possibly feasible in the

not-too-distant future). Since the human brain is

composed of two hemispheres that are very similar,

such that one hemisphere can take up the functions

of the other (in certain cases of injury etc.) the ques-

tion is what happens to a person should one or

both of the hemispheres be transplanted into an-

other persons cranium (removing the recipients

brain in the process), or into the empty crania of

two different recipients. Bernard Williams in his

1973 book Problems of the self has provided a

psychological version of this situation using a sci-

ence-fiction machine that scans the contents of the

brain and stores all the information therein (memo-

ries, intentions, desires) and transfers all this in-

formation to another persons brain (or more than

one person).

Consider two cases:

(C1) John is the original person; Alf is the recip-

ient (he receives half Johns brain in Wig-

gins case , or Johns brain contents using

Williams machine);

(C2) Jane is the original person, Frieda and

Claire are the recipients (each receive half of

Janes brain in the Wiggins case, or a copy of

Janes brain contents in the Williams case (while

the original brain is erased)).

Given that personal identity is one-to-one, in

(1) John-after-the-process is John-before-the-

process and Alf is supposedly another person, in (2)

it is not so clear whether (a) Frieda is Jane; or (a)

Claire is Jane; or (b) neither Frieda nor Claire is

Jane; but clearly one has to exclude the possibility

that (c) Frieda and Claire are both Jane (though one

may claim that (d) both Frieda and Claire were in

Jane, they were occupying her).

The problems illustrated in the above examples

are typical problems of personal identity. Neverthe-

less, before we delve any further into the issues, letus consider the metaphysical issue of identity.

2. IDENTITY AND ITS PROBLEMS

The kind of identity that concerns us in the first

place is diachronic identity, persistence through

time; in some cases, we are also concerned with

synchronic identity, identity at a time. Pre-philosophically, we consider John to be the same

person he was 10 minutes ago yesterday 5

years ago. Yet, pre-philosophically, we also consider

that John has changed, he has not remained identi-

cal to the person we knew 5 years ago (he may be

taller, think differently, and possibly have a new job

in a different city; he may have undergone religious

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conversion, and now he would vote for a different

party he also may have had plastic surgery). He

is different from that John. We need to delve philo-

sophically into the question to understand what liesbehind these seemingly conflicting intuitions, re-

garding persistence throughtime. Questions regarding

persistence atatimealso arise when considering the-

ses such as Multiple occupancy, which suggests that

Frieda and Clare were two persons living in the

same place at the same time: within Jane.

A. PERDURANTISM

The first thing to say about persistence through

time is that there are two ways of dealing with time

that provide two radically different ways of ap-

proaching the problem. Perdurantists consider time

to be just another dimension of spacetime, and time

is treated as we normally treat space. Usually, per-

durantism comes with eternalism about time, i.e., all

things exist in an equal degree: John of 5 years ago

exists and is as real and as present in the universe

as John of now and as John of 5 years from now

into the future. John is a four-dimensional worm:

just as Johns finger isnt John but simply part of

John, so John at time t is not John, but just a tem-

poral slice of the whole John, who is a temporally

extended entity. Hence, for perdurantists, the ques-

tion whether John-at-t1 is the same person as John-

at-t2 becomes one concerning whether the trans-

temporal John has temporal slices on the time axis

at t1 and t2.

This is probably the most elegant way of ap-

proaching problems of persistence through time,

but it is very far away from our common-sense no-

tions of persistence through time, and is committed

to a rigid determinism, since the future already ex-

ists: statements of modality are most consistently

understood in Lewis sense of modal individuals(that are conceptual aggregates of different individ-

uals living in close possible worlds). Assuming de-

terminism when searching for criteria of personal

identity, while heuristically acceptable from a meta-

physical standpoint, would make one wonder what

use could such a criterion serve, given that one of

the major uses of a criterion of personal identity is

in the field of ethics, and determinism makes non-sense of ethical discourse.

B. ENDURANTISM

The other position, held by endurantists, who

normally hold a presentist (tensed) conception of

time (this thingis, here and now; in the past it was

but it is not(now) what is wasin the past; in the fu-

ture it will be but it isnt(as yet, now) what it will

be: John was a child, is a law student, will be a barris-

ter; he is not, now, a barrister, nor is he a child) claims

that John, now, is fully John (not a temporal slice of

a trans-temporal John), that John 5 years ago was

also wholly and completely John, and that the John

of now is the same concrete particular as the John

of 5 years ago.

The problem, here, concerns change. One may

appeal to the distinction between qualitative sameness

that comes in degrees, up to the point where two

(or more) qualitatively identical things are indiscern-

ible (in this sense we speak of identical twins)

and numerical samenesswhereby two different names

or labels are discovered (or known) to designate the

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same thing (the planet nearest to the Sun is Mer-

cury). If I take a red brick and paint it white, it is

still numerically the same brick though not qualita-

tively the same brick (the brick survives a change inproperties). Similarly, if I chip off one of the bricks

corners, it still is numerically the same brick (it sur-

vives a change in parts). This seemingly obvious dis-

tinction is nonetheless problematic: how may of

these little alterations can I do to the brick in order

that it remain numerically identical to the original

red brick? In fact, though change in properties can

be dealt with by building an essential-accidental dis-tinction into ones concept of concrete particulars,

most endurantists deny that a concrete particular

can survive a change in parts (since this cannot but

concern the essence), (Loux, 2002:241).

In other words, if one seeks to avoid invoking

an essential-accidental distinction in ones account

of concrete particulars, one cannot maintain that a

concrete particular can survive a change in proper-

ties (let alone in parts). For a bundle theorist (claim-

ing that there is no more to the brick that the sum

of its attributes: redness, shape, hardness, weight,

density), changing an attribute does affect the

structure of the concrete particular. If, on the other

hand, the endurantist invokes some kind of essen-

tial-accidental distinction in ones account of con-

crete particulars, she may claim that change in prop-

erties does not affect the core of the particular

(and allows numerical identity to be conserved), but

how will she deal with the problem of change in

parts? A bare substratum theorist must tell us some-

thing about the bare substratum: can a complex

particular (a hill, a field) have a substratum? Can a

living being have a substratum (that is over and

above the substratum of the physical complex con-

stituting it)? Do persons have bare substrata? The

problem, here, is that if we start saying what the

bare substratum is and what it isnt, and by whichthings (encountered in ordinary language) can it be

possessed and by which things it cannot, our sub-

stratum starts becoming essentially characterised

it is no longer bare of any attributes.

One may try to avoid these problems by being

Aristotelian, and applying substance theory to con-

crete particulars. Aristotle did not however consider

a substance every thing that ordinary language treats

as a thing: tables, chairs, marble blocks, rivers

Substances were, for Aristotle, living things and

basic blocks of his physical paradigm (the four ele-

ments). Hence, even if we adopt some form of sub-

stance theory, we would still need to go down to the

elements of our physical paradigm (say muons, glu-

ons, quarks, assumed to be physical simples) to

speak of substances. Being indivisible, these physical

simples cannot undergo change in parts and hence

can endure in time; hence Aristotelian endurantists

may deny that something persists through a change

in parts while claiming that the basic blocks of our

universe do not undergo change in parts and hence

endurance is possible. Yet the question whether

living beings, and persons in particular, can be treat-

ed as substances still remains from Aristotle, and

raises a plethora of problems, especially in the pre-

dominant physicalist view of the world. Is there

something indivisible that constitutes the person,

allowing a person to endure in time?

Roderick Chisholm (cit. in Loux, 2002) suggests

that a person could be something microscopic, lo-

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cated somewhere in the brain. Whatever this might

be, the important thing about it, according to the

above reasoning, is that it be a simple substance.

But if we have to postulate simple substances be-sides those invoked in explaining our physical para-

digm, if there other simples in the universe besides

quarks, muons and gluons, we are back into some

form of dualism1, precisely what Chisholm is trying

to avoid. If on the other hand we want to maintain

the claim that the person is ultimately a group of

cells (some part of the brain) or else a series of

memories, intentions and other psychological datastored in the states in which such cells are, then,

claiming that the person survives a change in parts

(e.g. permanent loss of some memories, death of

some brain cells involved in consciousness)

would have to be coupled with abandoning the use

of the strict and philosophical reading of numerical

identity when speaking of persons. The upshot of

this is that it seems that unless one is a dualist or aperdurantist, one cannot render the intuitive I am

the same person I was 10 years ago with the philo-

sophical notion of numerical identity understood to

apply in an all-or-none and one-to-one way. In oth-

er terms, a physicalist endurantist cannot speak of

the persistence of persons through time as she

speaks of the endurance of quarks. A person, it

seems, may loose parts, and hence persistence ofpersons through time becomes a matter of degree

(I am 80% the same person I was 10 years ago)

and holds between more than one person (Frieda

1 Understood as the theory claiming that there exists in theuniverse something else beyond what is known empirically.

and Clare are both Jane; they both derive from parts

of the person Jane).

One may claim at this point that such a notion

of person is counter-intuitive; but this is a conten-

tious claim, since we have, in everyday language,

different notions of person. Clearly, in a normative

context (law, ethics), and in a religious context,

common language avoids indeterminate notions of

the person, and does not easily admit that a person

can be duplicated or divided, or that two person

could be united into one. But certainly, there are

also in common language less rigid notions of per-

son that we may invoke in metaphysics2.

3. PERSONAL PERSITENCE

Let us, at this point, take a moment to define

our terminology. In the case of perdurantism, given

that temporal slices of a person are numerically dis-tinct, one can hardly speak of personal identity.

Hence, a more general term, I suggest, would be

personal persistence, that would cover bothpersonal

perdurance and personal endurance (according to the

different interpretation of persistence through time).

Within personal endurance, I distinguish between

personal identityand personal contiguity, the former be-

2 It is not so obvious, as some authors seem to suggest, thatrigid notions of personal identity mirror our pre-philosophicnotions. We often speak experiences of change (e.g. growth of achild, maturation of teenagers, adult conversion, repentance,radical transformation, moral corruption) using diversitylanguage applied to persons: John is not the same person anymore, Margaret is not the same person she was 8 years ago. Infact, ordinary language assumes personal identity in certaincontexts and personal alteration in other, and assumes these tocome in varying degrees. Hence, before claiming that ordinarylanguage suggests a rigid notion of personal identity, one mustaccount for these uses of diversity language.

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ing a relation that is one-to-one and all-or-none, the

latter being a relation of degree that can hold be-

tween more than two observed entities. Using a

different way of subdividing personal persistence,one may say that personal identity is a type of rigid

personal persistence, personal contiguity a type of non-

rigid personal persistence. The notion of rigidity ap-

plied to perdurance becomes a question of whether

the perdurantist allows overlap when cutting up

spacetime or not. The 4-dimensional ontology of

perdurance allows ample gerrymandering when cut-

ting up spacetime, no particular way of cutting upspacetime is metaphysically privileged. Hence, we

can define Alf II as the section of spacetime com-

posed of John-before-the-procedure (and adjacent

temporal slices extending backward in time) and Alf

(and adjacent temporal slices extending forward in

time), and define John II as the section spacetime

occupied by John-after-the-procedure and adjacent

temporal slices extending forward in time (with re-spect to the procedure). This is a non-overlapping

way of cutting spacetime, that allows us to speak of

rigid personal persistence (even though its rigidity

may be very counter-intuitive, as shown by the ex-

ample itself: to the common person in the street,

the definitions of Alf II and John II state that John-

before-the-procedure perdures as Alf, and that

John-after-the-procedure is not the same person asJohn-before-the-procedure.) One may, nevertheless

allow overlap, by defining, say, John III as John-

before-the-procedure (and preceding slices) plus

John-after-the-procedure (and successive slices) and

defining Alf III as John-before-the-procedure (and

preceding slices) plus Alf (and successive slices).

Since John III and Alf III share sections of

spacetime, we may say that they are similar to a cer-

tain degree (according to the volume of spacetime

they share): here we have a case of non-rigid per-

sonal persistence in the case of perdurance; notethat the idea that a person may be a persistence in

time of a contemporary person, or a even of a fu-

ture person, is unproblematic in an eternalist con-

ception of time.

3. SIMPLE AND COMPLEX VIEWS.

One may nevertheless contest the fact that eve-ryday language supports metaphysical notions of

rigid and non-rigid personal persistence, and one

may want to stick to rigid personal persistence, in-

sisting that any notion of personal persistence that

comes in degrees and that is not a one-to-one rela-

tion is counter-intuitive. In this case, the most rea-

sonable alternatives are perdurantism and some

form of dualism. Let us consider a number of met-aphysical universes to explore these possibilities3.

A) In group A of universes, there are things(tables, chairs, atoms, human bodies) and,

separately, persons. Personhood and its per-

sistence through time is an ultimate unana-

lysable fact; the observable persistence of

body, brains, experiences, intentions, etc.,

does not ontologically constitute personal

identity, but serves only as fallible evidence

3 The enumeration does not have the pretence of being exhaus-tive: I have in mind to represent the most popular positions andthink that my arguments can be extended to more nuancedconstructions.

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in the evaluation of whether the person has

persisted in the time span being considered.

a. In universe Aa, unity of consciousnessis not a sufficient criterion of personal

persistence, though some degree of

unity of consciousness is necessary for

personal persistence. Two persons can

therefore feel, consider themselves or

be conscious of being the same person.

The scenario allows the possibility of

two separate persons (say Johann and

Frederick) living in two different, but

subjectively indistinguishable worlds, to

have the same consciousness at time t0,

which time marks the separation of

their life histories. An intuitive render-

ing of this scenario is the situation re-

sulting after a case of branch-line tele-

transportation whereby Johann is tele-

transported to the subjectively indistin-

guishable world4, Twin-earth (hence in-

stantiating Frederick) while the original

body (and person: Johann) is not de-

stroyed (and remains on Earth). After

the procedure, both Johann and Fred-

4

Subjectively indistinguishable means that all that is known byhumans on both Earth and Twin-Earth is identical; but possi-bly, further investigations (e.g. in the nature of sub-atomic par-ticles) would reveal in the future (after t0) that the two worldsare objectively different. For instance, emeralds have alwaysbeen green on both Earth and Twin-Earth, but at tx (1 hr aftert0), the emeralds on Twin-Earth become blue, while those onearth stay green. This is eventually traced to a difference in thenature of quarks: on Earth they are eternally stable, on twin-earth, twin-quarks are such that they shift to a different config-uration once every n years (n > (tx-tg); where tg marks the timewhen Twin-Earth came into being).The point, here, is to allowJohann and Frederick to have different histories after t0, whicha rigid determinist might not otherwise allow.

erick feel that they are the same person

as Johann-before-the-procedure, just

woken up to continue with his life.

(Furthermore, one may assume that

the teletransporter and its operator are

undetectable by the scientific instru-

ments on both Earth and Twin-Earth,

and that its operation does not leave

any noticeable signs in either world:

there is already Twin-Johann on Twin-

Earth, and the matter composing him

is simply shaped into Frederick without

affecting any other matter on Twin-

Earth. Neither Johann nor Frederick

know anything about the teletranspor-

tation).

b. In universe Ab, consciousness is both anecessary and a sufficient condition for

personhood: two persons cannot be

conscious of being the same person. If

at time t0, Frederick is conscious of be-

ing Johann for times before t0, they

must be the same person; if they are

separate persons, Frederick cannot ever

be conscious of being Johann.

B)

In group B of universes, persons are notseparate from the physical and mental states

that indicate their presence to the senses;

personhood does not transcend the observ-

able. Furthermore, it is assumed that the

mental rests on the physical, at least in the

sense that if physical matter were to be re-

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moved from these universes, nothing would

remain.

a. Ba is an endurantist universe in which aperson endures: he exists wholly and

completely at each of several different

times.

b. Bb is a perdurantist universe wherein aperson perdures: she has temporally

different parts; Jane-of-8-years-ago and

Jane-of-two-minutes-ago are temporal

slices of Jane, just like Janes right hand

and Janes external ear are spatial slices

of Jane.

The groupings A and B represent two different

positions in matters of personal identity (or contigu-

ity). Group A represents the so-called simple viewof

personal persistence: beyond the observable or em-

pirical person, there is what I will call a transcendentalperson5; empirically determined persistence in time is

only fallible evidence for persistence on the tran-

scendental level. In Group B of universes, one as-

sumes the complex view, whereby there exists a

criterion of personal persistence that a third party

can observe. There is something (else) that personal

persistence consists in: it is an analysable fact given

that persons are not (to be considered as) separatelyexisting entities; they are dependent on mental

and/or physical entities6.

5 In the Kantian sense of non (fully) empirically accessible in adirect manner.

6 Pace Noonan (1989:121-122)s claim (sustained by hardy anyargumentation) that the complex view does not entail a meta-physical reductionism (or rather reductivism) but only a

I will argue that Aa and Bb are interesting ways

of dealing with personal persistence, though not

very useful in dealing with the real issues we are

concerned with in the personal identity literature.Ab and Ba seem untenable, though endurantism

may support a less rigid notion of personal persis-

tence than personal identity.

I will proceed here by arguing against Ab. The

arguments apply also to versions of Bb (perduran-

tism plus complex view) that identify the person

with consciousness.

A. PERSONS AND CONSCIOUSNESS

Many people holding the simple view tend to

limit the transcendental person to consciousness,

following a more general trend to identify person-

hood with consciousness, or at least to claim that

persistence of self-consciousness is a necessary and

sufficient condition to persistence of personhood. A

logical reductionism as characterized by Dummett. Accordingto Noonan, the complex view only entails that there exist rela-tions satisfying [a kind membership characterization] whosespecification informatively constrains the class of possible per-sonal histories. As I understand it, to specify informativelysuch relations is to give an empirically verifiable criterion, oth-erwise creation by creator-demon and not destruction by de-stroyer-demon could be a criterion that satisfies Noonansdefinition (provided we explain in a logically consistent way ifand how these demons intervene, say, in a case of reduplica-tion). Hence, if we claim that such empirically verifiable criteria

(say having the same experiences, or possessing the same brain)are to be ontologically and conceptually dependent on persons(121) and not on independent as in the case of Parfits bundlesof experiences, we need a theory of concrete particulars where-in what is ontologically and conceptually dependent on per-sons cannot be reduced to being ontologically and conceptuallydependent on something simpler than a person. Though defini-tionally distinct, it seems that the complex view, some form ofreductionism, and (I would add) perdurantism go together (giv-en the above discussion). If one maintains that the informativecriteria sought by the complex view must be empirical, or ob-servationally accessible, one can hardly also maintain that suchcriteria belong to persons, understood, say, as observationallyinaccessible simple substances.

7

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person, according to Locke, is a thinking intelligent

being with reason and reflection that can consider

itself as itself, the same thinking being, in different

times and places (Locke, cit. in Noonan, 1989:10).From this definition, one may deduce that the nec-

essary and sufficient conditions for personhood are

reason, reflection and consciousness; since reason-

ing and reflection are actions limited in time and

their contents may change, it seems that only con-

sciousness seems relevant to the issue of personal

persistence. It is debatable whether we can use crite-

ria for personal persistence that do not belong toour definition of the person, since if we claim, say,

that mammals have episodic memory, continuity of

episodic memory (or quasi-memory) may entail that

a person is the same mammal as another person,

but not necessarily the same person (if we want to

maintain that there is something special about per-

sons, and that issues of personal persistence are not

reducible to ones of mammal persistence). HoweverI shall side-step this issue, and return to the issue of

consciousness, that has a considerable importance

in the literature, given the widespread assumption of

Lockes definition of person.

I think that it difficult to argue for Universe Ab

without postulating some more metaphysically sta-

ble substrate for consciousness. Seemingly, Ab

overcomes the quietism of Aa by suggesting that

though there is nothing observable which could tell

us if Frederick is Johann or not, if Frederick is Jo-

hann then he must be conscious of being the same

person as Johann, if not, he must be conscious of

being someone else. Since there is something it is like

being Johann to which one has no access if one

does not know what it is like to be Johann and if

one has never been Johann we cannot, on this

sole basis, tell if Frederick is Johann or not, except

by asking him whether he feels he is Johann or not.

This causes epistemological problems that make usfall into the metaphysical quietism of Aa (Frederick

may or may not be Johann, we cannot really tell

there is no way by which we can verify criteria of

personal identity or personal persistence any logi-

cally coherent criterion is plausible and hence we

have no one criterion to which we can appeal for

fecund analysis of the problems of personal persis-

tence)7.

But what is problematic with asking Frederick if

he is conscious of being the same person as Johann

or not? Imagine that Frederick finds out about the

teletransportation, and has internally warranted be-

lief that Twin-Earth came into existence at t0, and

that Earth had been destroyed in the teletransporta-

tion process: one expects him to be conscious of

being Johann, even though his belief might not

track the truth. Or imagine that Frederick and Jo-

hann both become astronauts, and after being lost

in space, find a planet which they think is their

planet: Frederick lands on Earth, Johann on Twin-

Earth. Each would be convinced that he his the

same person that left that planet on the spaceship a

few years back: that the friendships he had, the

places he visited, the quarks he is made of are those

present in the world where he landed. Hence, the

fact that Frederick feels he is Johann does not guar-

antee that there is personal identity between the

two.

7 We shall return to this below.

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B. A BROADER VERSION OF THE SIMPLE VIEW

Let us now consider universe Aa. I think we

cannot summarily dismiss Aa, if anything because

most of our moral intuitions and laws belong to a

linguistic and conceptual paradigm of religious

origin, where such a conception of personhood is

predominant8. The problem with it is its quietism: if

we cannot definitely determine if p1 at t1 is the

same person as p2 at t2 through experience, we

could find all sorts of criteria for determining

whether p2, after a certain mind- or brain-involving

process, possesses the same soul, cogito, psyche etc.

as p1 that existed before the process, so long as the

metaphysical structure is logically coherent. Such

transcendental persons can be mortal or immortal,

divisible or indivisible, created or eternal, etc. This

pluralism, I feel, is not problematic from the meta-

physical point of view (unless one holds the dogma

that all but what is posited by the simplest and neat-

est theory is inexistent): we could have all sorts of

internally coherent metaphysical notions of the per-

son and criteria of personal persistence. The point,

however, is that what has given rise to the personal

identity literature is not simply a quest for endless

8 Personal identity debates are not new to Philosophy; theyhave an old tradition. Ever since the Latin term persona (from

gr.prosopon, a theatrical term for mask or character, e.g. perso-nae dramatis) was applied to the Christian God, people havewondered how one could reconcile the idea of three personswith one substance (triune consubstantiality). More recent dis-cussions in Theological Philosophy focus on the problematicfusion of the concept-experience of Christian Love (personalGod) with the Greek idea of Unmoved mover, e.g. after PierreAubenques definition of the Aristotelian God as the unlovinglover. These issues show how in Philosophy, the person hasbeen linked to some non-corporeal metaphysical foundation,and how the discussion of personal identity issues has, in thetradition, presupposed such a notion of person. One wonders,at this point, whether such discussion can still make sense witha more physicalist notion of the person.

metaphysical speculation, neither simply a taste for

science-fiction thought experiments and even less a

desire to justify metaphysically the various religious

understandings of the person: we are rather con-cerned with having answers useful and relevant to

normative philosophy, say, bioethics, we want to

know what founds a persons rights and responsibil-

ities. On this account, the complex view seems

more interesting, since it claims to provide criteria

that are empirically accessible.

C. PERDURANTISM AND ENDURANTISMABOUT PERSONS

Going over to Bb (after having discussed the

problems with Ba above), I think that perdurantism

does provide us with an attractive way of dealing

with issues of personal persistence. Yet, it is not

clear why a perdurantist should have any interest in

issues of personal persistence at all. Since perduran-

tism insists on allowing ample gerrymandering of

spacetime, it does not seem capable of providing an

account of why cutting up spacetime in such a way

that we have areas corresponding to the common

sense notion of person should be preferable to any

other way of cutting up spacetime (e.g. one which

puts together bits of dogs, cars, buildings, persons

etc. that are spatio-temporally adjacent). If persons

are ontologically equivalent to any other entities

resulting from a whatsoever system of cutting up

spacetime, issues ofpersonalpersistence has no par-

ticularmetaphysical significance.

I have already argued against Ba in Section 1 of

this essay (claiming that one cannot consistently be

a endurantist about persons and not be a dualist,

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unless one gives some plausible account of concrete

particulars to sustain ones view) An endurantist

may claim that quarks endure, but not that persons

endure in the same way as quarks, i.e. by remainingnumerically identical to themselves through time.

He may instead opt for personal contiguity, i.e. for a

non-rigid understanding of personal persistence.

4. WHAT IS THE POINT OF RIGID NO-

TIONS OF PERSONAL PERSISTENCE?

Though problematic and of limited use, a rigidnotion of personal persistence does seem to make

sense in Aa. However, I feel that within the more

physicalistic paradigms (Ba, Bb), personal identity

(as a one to one relation that does not come in de-

grees) is a fetish from the metaphysical point of

view. Clearly, from the normative point of view, we

need the concept of a determinate person (which is

not the soul, as religiously understood), just as weneed the concepts of good and bad (which are not

the religious concepts ofholyand evil), but this does

not entail that we must postulate a corresponding

metaphysical entity within a physicalist universe.

Thomas Reid (cit. in Noonan 1989:20) notes:

[Identity] has no fixed nature when applied to bodies, and

very often questions about it are questions about words. But

identity when applied to persons has no ambiguity and admits

not of degrees of more or less. It is the foundation of all rights

and obligations and of all accountableness, and the notion of it

is fixed and precise.

From such passages regarding the so-called de-

terminacy thesis, it seems that what matters is the

numerical identity of moral agents, not of meta-

physical entities. Indeed, from a metaphysical point

of view, rigid notions of personal persistence are of

limited use, both in Ba and Bb. Keeping rigid no-

tions of personal persistence within the limits of

normative philosophy, I think that from the de-scriptive standpoint we should make do with non-

rigid personal persistence.

Physicalists often compare personal persistence

with life as understood in contemporary Anglo-

American philosophy9: life is constituted by certain

structures (prokaryotic or eukaryotic cells, defined

in by necessary and sufficient criteria) capable of

performing certain (necessary and sufficient) func-

tions (respiration, growth, reproduction, sensitivity

to changes in the environment), rather than by

the presence of some elan vital. Life goes on as

long as these structures are not destroyed and they

continue performing the specified functions. Such a

characterisation is certainly a rigid notion of life:

one cannot be 50% alive. One may seek to establish

a similar characterization of what is necessary and

sufficient for personhood, and persistence through

time would then be a question of continuity in these

structures and functions. For instance, Stewart

(2001) argues that there are three Great Criteria of

personal identity and these are corporeal: episodic

memory is based in the neocortex, continuity in the

brain, subjectivity (consciousness) in the thalamus.

Such an approach, however whereby one is ei-

ther alive or dead, either 100% the same person or

another person decides borderline cases (viruses,

coma states) by appealing to the definition. The def-

inition is the final court of appeal to find out if x is

9 David Papineau (cit. in Stewart 2001) compares consciousnessto life in this way.

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living or not. But such definitions in biology do not

demarcate ontological differences or differences

that correspond to clear natural difference; rather,

since the borders are fuzzy, we need definitions tocut straight lines, to serve our convenience10. If so,

the criteria are normative ones, and we must not use

them to sustain metaphysical distinctions.

Consider the initial cases of John and Jane. Cer-

tainly, Alf and John-after-the-process are to some

degree personally persistent with John-before-the-

process, and Claire and Frieda are personally persis-

tent to some extent with Jane. If after the process

John and Jane were found guilty of a horrible mur-

der, non-rigid personal persistence would suggest

that John, Alf, Claire and Frieda need psychological

help and a programme of rehabilitation, while rigid

personal persistence would most probably let Alf

loose, as well as Claire, or Frieda, or both.

Or consider that Williams machine is marginal-

ly defective (or the surgeon in Wiggins case causes

minimal damage to a nerve) such that the aggres-

sive part of Johns brain that was responsible for

the murder is destroyed, or altered in the (99.8%

successful) duplication process, and John becomes a

peaceful, law-abiding, loving person with a normal

life: he has no memories of being abused by a vio-

lent father, no desires of sadism, no criminalthoughts. On Alfs side, the duplication is 99.7%

successful, however only some insignificant brain

10 For instance, the distinction between animals and plants isthere to there to specify what should be studied by botanistsand what by zoologists; that between living and non-living or-ganisms specifies what organisms are to be studied by virolo-gists and what by bacteriologists and mycologists.

cells (or brain data) were damaged; Alf follows in

the steps of John-before-the-process and becomes a

trigger-happy gangster. The police manage to find

evidence only for the murder before the duplicationprocess, and both John and Alf stand trial. Rigid

personal persistence would supposedly demand that

Alf be acquitted and John be convicted. Non-rigid

personal persistence, however, could allow that

even if John-after-the-process is overall more physi-

cally contiguous with John-before-the-process than

Alf, for legal and moral purposes, Alf is more con-

tiguous with John-before-the-process than John-after-the-process.

Consider, furthermore, Jane writes a will leaving

all her possessions to herself. After the procedure,

a Claire and Freida go to court, each claiming that

she is Jane and the other isnt. Of what use can a

rigid notion of personal persistence be in such cas-

es?

All these cases, and the above discussion, sug-

gest that we abandon rigid notions of personal per-

sistence in metaphysics (in particular, all talk of per-

sonal identity) and adopt a non-rigid language to

describe and deal with the cases in the personal

identity literature.

3. PARFIT AND WHAT MATTERS IN SUR-

VIVA L

This position was proposed, in a famous paper

by Derek Parfit (1971) who argued that the notion

of personal identity (or rigidnotions of personal per-

sistence) has little value in what we are philosophi-

cally concerned with when we are dealing with cer-

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tain problems regarding the human self. He targets

two dogmas of personal identity: a) that in [the]

cases [where we have no idea how to answer a ques-

tion about personal identity], the question aboutidentity must have an answer; b) that unless the

question about identity has an answer, we cannot

answer certain important questions (questions about

such matters as survival, memory, responsibility)

(3-4).

One can immediately recognize (a) as the de-

terminacy thesis (Is x identical to y, or not?), that

motives the search for internally coherent rigid no-

tions of personal persistence, and (b) as regarding

the use we can make of our notions of personal

persistence. In the above discussion, we argued that

universes Ab and Ba could not provide answers

since they are not tenable as such (they do not co-

herently allow for a rigid notion of personal persis-

tence), and that while universes Aa and Bb could

logically allow the possibility of a rigid notion of

personal persistence, such notion would not answer

questions like those in (b) above and hence are of

little use. In other words, criteria derived from such

ontologies either would not help us when dealing

with (a) or, if they do, they are of no use in tackling

the issues of (b). The way out of this deadlock

seems to be denying the truth of (a) and (b). In the

paper, Parfit adopts a non-rigid notion of persis-

tence, and proposes, as a criterion, psychological

connectedness. He then show how such a non-rigid

criterion can be used to solve problem cases, and

how it is useful in dealing with the issues of (b).

Unfortunately, some authors have reduced Par-

fits original intuition to the thesis that contrary to

what we are all naturally inclined to believe, we do

not have a basic and non-derivative concern for our

future existence and well-being (Noonan, 1989: 23-

24) and summed up his position to the motto iden-tity is not what matters in survival. Parfit, however,

uses the issue of survival only as an example

(1971:4) to show that personal identity because of

its rigidity is a concept of little use and should be

replaced by notions that are not one-to-one and all-

or-none. Hence, the main thesis in his paper is

much wider that sub-thesis (identity is not what

matters in survival) from which the paper gained itsfame. Parfit claims that when we use the language

of personal identity, what matters (e.g. when we

are considering a case of someone surviving a brain

operation) isnt really personal identity as Locke

understands it, but rather another sort of persis-

tence of persons through time. Discussing survival,

Parfit states:

The relation of the original person to each of the resulting peo-

ple contains all that interests us all that matters in

any ordinary case of survival. [] Most of the relations which

matter can be provisionally referred to under the heading psy-

chological continuity. [] I said earlier that what matters in

survival could be provisionally referred to as psychological

continuity. I must now distinguish this relation from another,

which I shall call psychological connectedness. [] Now

that we have distinguished the general relations of psychologicalcontinuity and psychological connectedness, I suggest that con-

nectedness is a more important element in survival.

Parfit (1971:10-11.20-21)

Hence, Parfits intuition is that we need a dif-

ferent language, since the language of identity,

[though its use] is convenient [] can lead us

astray (p 11); judgements of personal identity have

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great importance [but] what gives them their im-

portance is the fact that they imply psychological

continuity [? i.e. connectedness ?]11 (p 12). This, I

think, is quite different from the thesis regardingwhether my concernthat I survive wholly and com-

pletely (in the problem cases of the personal identity

literature) and not someone else, and not as two

persons, and not as 49% of a person and 51% of

another is originary or derived.

What is the purpose of the thesis regarding my

concern about my survival in Parfits paper? At the

onset of the paper, speaking about the first dogma

Parfit (pp. 3-4) states: My targets are two beliefs [

; t]he first is that in these cases the question about

identity must have an answer. [..] I cannot see how

to disprove this first belief. I shall describe a prob-

lem case. But this can only make it seem implausi-

ble. Parfits example mirrors the John and Jane cas-

es at the beginning of this essay, and illustrates the

difficulties one encounters in attempting an answer.

What I have tried to do in this essay is to show that

the difficulty to providing such an answer is inher-

ent in our ways of understanding time and concrete

particulars. Rigid personal persistence claims that it

respects the fact that, intuitively, Jane sees herself

after the procedure only as dead, as Claire or as

11 In the first part of the paper, Parfit uses the concept of psy-chological continuity as a first approximation before introduc-ing that of psychological connectedness. Hence my addition insquare brackets.

Frieda, but not as somewhat both12. I contest this

by saying that this is not true (she cansee herself as

being somewhat both) and even if it were, this does

not justify rigid personal persistence as a descriptivetheory unless one can argue for the internal coher-

ence of rigid personal persistence; and demonstrate

that Jane is not using a normative or religious idea

of person to evaluate a hypothetical situation that

nobody, as yet, has gone through. Parfit, on the

other hand, introduces the aspect of concern for my

future existence claiming that contrary to what cer-

tain rigid theorist claim, such concern does notcause problems for the non-rigid notions of person-

al persistence; it can be analysed in terms of the en-

tities posited by such notions. Hence, Parfit analyses

this concern in terms of the entities posited by his

psychological connectedness criterion (that Noonan

calls Parfitian survivors). However, if such an anal-

ysis may appear not convincing to some, one should

nonetheless point out that the idea of what we areconcerned with has limited use in deciding meta-

physical issues13. Clearly, if we have two theories of

logically equal standing, we may find one more in-

teresting if it reflects what we are concerned with.

But one can hardly claim that myconcerncan ground

metaphysical entities and relations. Many people are

concerned with surviving death in an afterlife, but

12 Multiple occupancy seems to be an alternative, but it seemsto imply that every time we use Williams machine, we have topostulate another occupant in the original brain. This, I think, ismore counter-intuitive than the appeal to non-rigid personalpersistence, given that different notions of person and of same-ness are co-present in ordinary language, some of which dosupport non-rigid personal persistence.

13 That is, one cannot reject a metaphysical notion, say, of per-sonal persistence simply because it does not account for whatwe are concerned with.

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this does not prove metaphysically that there is an

afterlife and that these persons will be related to

their counterparts in the afterlife in a one-to-one

and all-or-none fashion. Unless there is a metaphys-ically coherent explanation of the entities I am con-

cerned with, unless metaphysics can provide an on-

tology wherein what I am concerned with exists and

makes sense, one cannot invoke metaphysics to deal

with such concerns, but should rather appeal to

theology, psychology and other disciplines14.

9. CONCLUSION

In this essay, I have argued that the known

metaphysical construals of personal identity, and of

other rigid notions of personal persistence (those

that insist that the relation be one-to-one and all-or-

none) are either inconsistent or not useful in dealing

with what we are concerned with in the issues of the

personal identity literature, and that we should con-sider using non-rigid notions, such as personal con-

tiguity. Furthermore, I have claimed that this is the

main point underlying Parfits 1971 paper.

14 Some rather vitriolic critics of Emmanuele Severino (Univ. ofVenice)s grotesque neo-parmenidean ontology claim that hebuilt his whole system in order to cope with the tragic death ofhis brother (who is reported to have committed suicide in frontof him when he was still a child). In Severinos metaphysics,things (that are) are neither created nor destroyed, they simplyappear and disappear as we move through time (compare withthe 4-d perdurantist ontology). Even if these critics were right,this does not mean that Severinos concern with the continuedexistence of his brother explains the plausibility and the fame ofhis ontology; rather one must admit that his theory has a valuein itself, and that to Severinoit could have an added value inthat it helps him deal with his childhood trauma.

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xiv+303pp.

Noonan, H. W. 1989. Personal Identity.

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Parfit, D. 1971. Personal Identity. In The Philo-

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Parfit, D. 1984. Reasons and Persons. Oxford Uni-

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is there such a thing as personal identity?

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